Our "Blackie" is no "Whitey!"

"Enemy to those who make him an enemy ..... friend to those who have no friend - that's Blackie!"

Winter Blues: While in prison together in 1997, Steve 'The Rifleman' Flemmi told members of the Winter Hill Gang that he and James 'Whitey' Bulger were FBI informants.

John Martorano guns for 'The Rifleman'
By Howie Carr
Wednesday, April 27, 2011

One day in 1997, they all filed back into Judge Wolf’s courtroom for another day of hearings. The defendants — Johnny and Jimmy Martorano, Stevie Flemmi, Frankie Salemme and Robert DeLuca — all sat together in the jury box. This day, Wolf announced he would like to see Flemmi and his lawyer, Kenny Fishman, alone in his chambers. In private, the judge told Stevie that the next day he was going to release his name — as well as those of Whitey and Sonny Mercurio — as informants. Wolf told him that this would be his final opportunity to agree to testify.

That night, everyone climbed wearily onto the bus back to Plymouth — everybody except Stevie. They all thought he was gone for good. But after dinner, Flemmi bounded back into Cellblock H and announced that he needed to get everyone together because he had an announcement to make. They filed into a small room next to the visitors’ area.

“I was an informant for over thirty years,” Stevie said. “And so was Whitey. Wolf’s going to tell you that in court tomorrow. But I wanted you to hear it from me first, because it’s not what you think it is. Me and Whitey gave them (expletive) and got back gold in return.”

Martorano: “I was crushed. I mean, I loved that guy. Now I wanted to kill him and at the same time I was heartbroken. Stevie said he gave them (expletive)? It wasn’t (expletive) to get himself and Whitey cut out of the race-fixing indictment when all the rest of us went down.

“Yeah, he and Whitey gave ’em (expletive) all right — and I was the (expletive). Me and my brother and Howie (Winter) and all the rest. And these two guys were the godfathers of my sons!

“It was killing me, thinking about what they’d done. Then on top of everything else, I started feeling guilty. This was all my fault. It was me who brought them both into the gang. Whitey came to me; I’m the one who introduced him to Howie. If I don’t help him out ’cause I owed Billy O a favor, maybe the Mullens would have killed him and none of this happens. And then Stevie — sure, Howie helped him come back from Montreal, too, but I was the one who was pushing Howie to do it, whispering in his ear every day. It’s all my fault, that’s what I’m thinking.

“I says, Well, (expletive) it, this is just too embarrassing. I don’t want people to think I’m involved in this. I’m in tears. I loved this guy at one point but (expletive) it, I’ll just kill him . . .

“I think I could have killed him and gotten away with it. I planned it out for a while. Even if they got me for it, so what? I’m facing one murder charge instead of twenty. Plus, if I don’t kill him, for the rest of my life — my life in prison — people who Stevie put in jail will be asking me, ‘Why didn’t you stop him when you had the chance?’

“My plan was simple. I was three doors down from him. The doors are locked at 9 p.m., and at 6 a.m. they press a master button, and all the cells are unlocked. There were cameras everywhere, but that time of day, before dawn, it was real dark, too dark for the camera to catch anything but a shadow. What I would do is, I would go into his cell and either strangle or stab him, then pull the blanket over his head, and close the cell door behind me, locking it. Then I’d go down to the mess hall and get in line.

“See, Plymouth was a boring place. They didn’t have jobs there. They might find his body right afterward, but chances are they don’t discover he’s dead for twelve hours — until the first lockdown of the night, at 6:30. We talked about it, and one of the other guys offered to help me out if I needed any assistance.”

From Hitman: The Untold Story of Johnny Martorano: Whitey Bulger’s Enforcer and the Most Feared Gangster in the Underworld by Howie Carr. Copyright © 2011 by the author and reprinted by permission of Forge Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited.